When did you start at Kaplan?

I joined Kaplan Higher Education [as Executive Director of Marketing] when it was launching its online high schools. The idea was to cater to kids with special needs — athletes, entertainers, advanced students, pregnant teens, etc.

Our competitors included University of Phoenix, Knowledge Care Group’s IQ Academy and K12.com.

Kaplan started in test prep then expanded to online universities. We acquired brick and mortar colleges and started a tutoring biz in California. The company was bought by the Washington Post sometime around 1984.

How important was testing and tracking at Kaplan?

Being a new business unit, we tested and tracking everything. [We ran] PPC [pay-per-click], radio, newspaper, and had partnerships like with the Chris Everett Tennis Academy in Boca.

We used unique 800#’s and URLs for each placement. Our back-end tracking through Salesforce.com had unique identifier appended to records all the way through the process.

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Copyright 2010 by Aaron Goldman and McGraw-Hill. All rights reserved. All other trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective holders. Note: neither this book nor the author is affiliated with Google.

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